Lion and old Word docs

[Carter Warmke]

I have MS Word 2011. I occasionally need to open old Word docs
created in the 1990's. For some reason, my 2011 version won't open
the old Word docs. Pre Lion, I just used an older version of Word
(PowerPC) to open the docs and, if needed, to convert them to a newer
version that 2011 will open. Now, Lion won't run PPC apps, so I'm
stuck transferring the docs to another computer using Snow Leopard.
Any suggestions?

 

[Avrum Lapin]

I have MS Word 2011. I occasionally need to open old Word docs
created in the 1990's. For some reason, my 2011 version won't open
the old Word docs. Pre Lion, I just used an older version of Word
(PowerPC) to open the docs and, if needed, to convert them to a newer
version that 2011 will open. Now, Lion won't run PPC apps, so I'm
stuck transferring the docs to another computer using Snow Leopard.
Any suggestions?

Consider OpenOffice or NeoOffice (both free, to open these older Word
docs in Lion and if needed save in Word (.docx). Or just save in .odt
and abandon Word.

 

[Michael Vilain]

Consider OpenOffice or NeoOffice (both free, to open these older Word
docs in Lion and if needed save in Word (.docx). Or just save in .odt
and abandon Word.

Supposedly, the OpenXML converter will read the Word X documents
In other words, you'll have to either keep a Snowleopard machine around
running Word 2004 just to convert these files as needed OR do a document
conversion of all your archives to the new Word 2011 format.

There might be some 3rd-party business that you could ship all the
documents to on a couple disks and they'd do the conversion for you for
a fee.

So, bottom line, you'll have to go back to Snowleopard and Word 2008 to
read these documents. Just upgrading to a new OS version suck with
checking all this out first sucks, huh?